[impegh]

I read this same empty “goalposts” lament multiples times a day when reading this website, and though I know what the words mean I’m confused what you all think they mean.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Is this just some performative grousing or do you really think what has been developed to date is “artificial intelligence”?

These comments all conveniently fail to define their author’s goalposts that apparently have been reached or surpassed. What were yours?

[cornel_io]

There was a very recent time when passing some version of the Turing Test would have been a fairly commonly accepted goalpost. Many experts thought that was 20+ years away, and were perfectly comfortable saying that it was their "bar", primarily because they thought generating convincing conversational text was so difficult that you'd basically have to solve All The Problems(TM) first.

Notice how nobody is talking about the Turing Test anymore now that it's either already been passed or is very damn close? We can argue back and forth about whether the real stupidity was the earlier expectation that the Turing Test was a useful threshold for AI, but it's impossible to claim that it wasn't a somewhat common and well-known one, so that goalpost really has been moved in a very dramatic way (or rather, removed altogether and replaced with nothing in particular other than a vague "I'll know it when I see it", in most cases).

[creer]

Exactly so. The posts have been moved safely waayyyy over there at AGI, and at "super-human" or at "critical thinking". And several stages or degrees of AGI have been hierarchized. There is a serious reluctance at accepting how dumb an algorithm can be and still compare with humans.

But it is also true that numerous ground techniques are issue of the field of AI and generally called AI as they come out. It makes for good press. And that too was silly.

[resonious]

Back in my CS undergrad we learned Dijkstra's Algorithm in AI class. Once upon a time, that was AI. I think AI just refers to newly discovered useful algorithms.

[quickthrower2]

Well for it to be Artificial and convey Intellgence. I think that goal has been met!

[F-Lexx]

How do you define intelligence?